


Not According To Plan

by youjik33



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 22:26:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1758517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youjik33/pseuds/youjik33
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If nobody remembers what happened on Cinco but Gob, and Gob pretends it didn't happen, then it didn't happen. Now he just has to stop seeing Tony. And answering Tony's calls. And thinking about Tony.</p>
<p>This is easier said than done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not According To Plan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vettel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vettel/gifts).



> This story contains spoilers for the movie "Marley & Me", which is not a warning I ever expected I'd have to put on an Arrested Development fic, but there you go.

_Hey Gobie, it's Tony! We still on for our sex date tonight?_

_Hey Gobie, it's Tony! We still on for our sex date tonight?_

_Hey Gobie, it's Tony! We still-_

Gob dropped the phone onto the bed, ran a hand through his hair, crossed his arms over his chest, and chewed on his lower lip. If Tony didn't remember, and Michael didn't remember, that meant the only person who knew he'd had gay sex was himself. And if he just pretended like it had never happened, that meant it _hadn't_ happened.

"That was a freebie," Gob said out loud. 

After all, if it hadn't happened that meant he wasn't gay, or gay-ish, or... whatever. Now all he had to do was not call Tony back. Ever. Leave him hanging indefinitely. It wasn't quite the revenge he'd planned, but he could work with it. Monday he'd put on a suit and go to the office and do whatever it was an acting president was supposed to do and forget about Color-Me-Mine and popcorn fights and all that awkward amazing fumbling in the dark and the way they fit together so well when they were spooning after and-

_-a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping-_

_-why don't you go away getaway, stay away getaway_

The synth-pop strains of Mark Cherry jolted Gob out of his head. He dove for the phone, juggled it for a second, and answered the instant he saw Tony's name on the screen.

"Hey," he said breathlessly.

"Hey, Gobie!" 

"Hey," Gob said again. "Hi. How are you?" Wait, he wasn't supposed to be talking to Tony at all. Damn it.

"Kind of... weird, actually. I thought today was Cinco, but apparently it's- the other Cinco. Which means I'm missing a day. And I've got a horrible headache. Do you know what happened last night?"

Gob didn't answer, not trusting his ability to lie -- not while he was standing right in the middle of the bedroom he and Tony had made such a mess of the night before.

"I didn't do tequila shots, did I?" Tony asked.

"Uh... yeah," Gob said. "Yes. That is exactly what happened."

"Oh man," Tony groaned. "I'm sorry. I can never hold my tequila, but it's so hard to resist on Cinco, you know?"

Gob held the phone away from his face for a second so Tony wouldn't hear his sigh of relief. "No, man, I get it. It's the holidays, why hold back?"

"Yeah, I guess," Tony said. But there was something hesitant in his voice. There was none of the usual polished confidence; this sounded less like the Tony who had asked Gob out at the Gothic Castle and more like the Tony who had stumbled into Gob's room in a rubber mask the night before. "So... nothing happened?"

"Nope. We definitely did not have any sex."

"Oh," Tony said. He sounded almost disappointed. "I don't know if you'd want to reschedule, or... I mean, I'd invite you out tonight, but this headache is killer."

"Maybe we should just stay in," Gob said. "Have a quiet night. Watch a movie."

"Sounds great," Tony replied. "How about takeout? Do you know China Garden?" 

"Uh... yeah, from Mexico," Gob said, baffled.

"There's one in Mexico? I thought we could just get some from the place down the street."

"Oh! Oh, you mean the restaurant. Yeah, that's great. That sounds great."

\------------

An hour later Gob found himself sitting in Tony Wonder's living room eating chicken lo mein while Tony apologized repeatedly about his alleged weakness for tequila. "So I really just overdid it and passed out?" he asked again, and Gob nodded. "And you drove me home and nothing else happened?"

"Nope," Gob said, trying not to look at the way Tony gestured with his hands while he talked, because if he looked at Tony's fingers he would remember the way they'd been wrapped around his cock the night before. This was bad. He stared very intently into the takeout box.

"Did you never learn how to use chopsticks?" Tony asked after a few seconds of awkward silence. 

"Nah," Gob said. "It just seemed like too much work. Like how is that really better than a fork?"

"No, I get it," Tony said, "but I thought, if you wanted, I could teach you."

"Yeah, okay," Gob said, but that meant he _had_ to look at Tony's hands, which just got him flustered, and the pieces of chicken he picked up kept just falling right back into the container.

"Calm down," Tony said. "Just watch how I do it."

"You're doing it _backwards_ ," Gob said. "This is as bad as the time Michael tried to teach me." 

"That shouldn't matter! Just pretend it's a mirror. No, look, you only move the top one, like-"

"Never mind," Gob said, dropping the chopsticks on the counter and stabbing his fork into the noodles again. 

Tony was staring at him. His eyes had this way of getting really intense, and it made the back of Gob's neck prickle in a way that he actually sort of liked even though it was uncomfortable. 

"Is something wrong, Gob?" Tony asked, and then, quietly, "I didn't throw up in your car, did I?"

"No! Nothing's _wrong_ , it's just-" He didn't have time to come up with a good excuse, because Tony's hand touched his thigh, and he jumped up so fast he banged his knee against the underside of the counter. "Movie!" Gob blurted. "We were going to watch a movie. Let's watch a movie."

"Yeah, okay," Tony said, scrambling to get the remains of dinner put away while Gob collapsed into a corner of the couch, tucking his legs underneath him. Tony set a glass of water on the coffee table in front of him even though Gob hadn't asked for one, and picked up the remote. "Wanna see what's on my DVR?" he asked, voice light. Maybe artificially so – it was hard to tell. When Gob gave a noncommital shrug he turned it on and scrolled through the stuff he'd recorded. "Uh, I have a lot of cooking shows for some reason. Wait, here's a movie."

Gob looked up at the screen. "I do not want to watch _Marley and Me_."

"Why not?" Tony's eyes narrowed. "You're not one of those people who hates Owen Wilson, are you, because that might be a dealbreaker."

"What? No, Owen's... fine I guess, I just don't want to watch a movie where the dog dies at the end and we're all crying. It's just not how I wanna spend the night, okay?"

"Okay." Tony leaned forward, lips curving into a smile that made his eyes crinkle at the corners and Gob's stomach do little flips. "So how _do_ you want to spend the night?"

What he really wanted to do was grab one of Tony's hands and suck on his fingers, and then maybe make out on the couch for a while, and then see if Tony's smaller size meant that Gob could pick him up as easily as he imagined he could, and then fuck him against the wall. 

But he also thought of forget-me-nows and what's-her-name's five-year-old and revenge plans and his mother's voice saying "no scandals!", so what he said was, "I should probably just call it a night."

As he walked to his car, Gob couldn't keep himself from looking back over his shoulder to where Tony stood in the doorway. The look of hurt and confusion on his face had been exactly what Gob had been aiming for when he'd started this whole scheme, but it wasn't satisfying at all. 

\------------

When Gob walked through the front door of the model home, he was surprised to find it already occupied (although he really shouldn't have been, considering there was a map car parked at the curb.)

"...Michael."

His brother barely glanced up from where he was sitting on the couch nursing a hard lemonade. "I thought I'd crash here for a while," he said, and Gob noticed the duffel bag on the floor next to him. 

"Uhh, okay, but if you think you're getting the master bedroom-"

"No, no, I'll just bunk up in George Michael's room. Anyway, I already looked around, and that bedroom's a disaster. What is that pink stuff all over the floor?"

"Nail polish," Gob said, and then, "It isn't mine."

"'course not." Michael's attention went back to his bottle, and Gob, not much in the mood to talk anyway, went to bed.

He lay there in the dark for a long time, looking up where he thought the hidden cameras were, before he finally fell asleep.

\------------

Most of the trash had been cleaned up when Gob came downstairs Sunday morning, and there was a four-pack of grocery store blueberry muffins on the counter; Gob ate one without really tasting it. He wandered around the house for a few minutes and found Michael staring blankly at the TV. Gob, feeling lost, flung himself across the couch and let out a long, soulful sigh. He was hoping Michael would ask him what was wrong so he could tell him it was none of his business, but his brother didn't rise to the bait, even after he tried it a couple more times. Disheartened, he found himself heading for the one room of the house he had been utterly avoiding.

The _To Entrap a Local Predator_ equipment was shoved into what had once been a secret room in the model home. Gob shut the door behind him, and then, even though he doubted Michael would be looking for him, jammed a chair in front of it to act as a barricade. He'd thought, when he'd thrown together the plan to expose Tony's sexuality, that finding and copying the video evidence would be easy, but it took him almost an hour just to figure out how to find the right camera's video feed and rewind the recorded footage. 

He skipped back through the previous day (it was unnerving, watching himself sleep), and then found out the hard way that just taking his hand off the button wouldn't stop the rewinding process and ended up hitting "play" sometime Friday afternoon. He'd planned on just copying the video to a USB drive and then deleting it from the computer; there was certainly no reason to watch it himself, not when he was trying to forget what had happened. But after a little fast-forwarding there he was on the screen, mask in hand, trying to hash out his revenge plan, and then there was Tony, standing momentarily stunned just inside the bedroom door, staring from behind his own mask. The green night-vision tint of the camera made the whole thing surreal, like he was watching ghosts caught on film, acting out something that had happened years ago instead of two days before. 

There wasn't any audio, which made the whole thing feel more distant. The two men on the screen shouted soundlessly at each other, and then they were pulling their masks off, and kissing; Tony pulled his shirt off, and Gob leaned closer to the computer to get a better look at the lines of his back and shoulders. This angle was new, and he was rubbing himself through his jeans before he even fully realized that he'd gotten hard. Once he'd gotten started, though, there didn't seem to be much point in stopping. He came even before his onscreen counterpart did, and then spent several frantic minutes searching the room for a box of tissues. 

\------------

Later, with both himself and the computer cleaned up, Gob crept back up to his room, video files safely on a USB drive that he shoved into the bottom of his underwear drawer. When the phone rang he knew it was going to be Tony even before he looked at the screen. He looked anyway, then put the phone down on the nightstand, then picked it up, then put it down again. 

"Ugh," he said out loud. It didn't really help. 

It rang again; apparently Tony was persistent, and Gob had never been one for self-control.

"Hey," he said. Gob heard the excitement in his own voice and inwardly cringed.

"You picked up." Tony sounded a little surprised.

"Yeah, I would have earlier, I was... doing... something."

"You want to try a redo?" Tony said. "I could come over tonight."

"That's..." Gob sighed. "My brother's here now. He just kinda showed up, I guess he plans on mooching off of me for a while. That's so like him, too."

"Oh," Tony said. "Well... we could meet somewhere else." He lowered his voice to almost a purr. "What about that pool in your neighborhood? We could sneak out there at night, just the two of us, take a little private swim--"

"I don't know where my bathing suit is," Gob said.

"Even better."

"Oh," Gob said. " _Oh_." And even though skinny-dipping in a neighborhood full of sex offenders was maybe not the best idea, when he thought about what it would be like, just him and Tony and the heated pool and the full moon, it took every bit of self-denial he possessed to say "I really don't think I can." He cleared his throat. "Work in the morning, you know. Maybe later. Sometime. Next week?"

"Next week," Tony said, disappointment clear in his voice. "I'm holding you to that, you know."

\------------

_-why don't you go away getaway, stay away getaway-_

"Mmmm, yeah?"

"Did I wake you up?"

"What-- _yes_ , Jesus, Mom, it's two in the morning."

"Good. I don't want you out partying all night. You're going to be in your office at nine a.m., is that clear?"

"Yes, fine, I know, a suit, no scandals, I wasn't going to call him again anyway."

"Call _who_ again?" The pitch of her voice rose dramatically. "Gob, if you're-"

He hung up before she could yell any more.

\------------

 

"You just sit in here quietly and don't cause any trouble. Can you handle that?" Lucille said, sheparding Gob into his office.

"What am I supposed to _do_?" he asked. "Stare at these stupid posters?"

"I bought you a present." His mother pulled a paper-wrapped package out of her purse and shoved it at him.

He tore into it, his excitement over getting something for free trumping his distrust of his mother; it turned out to contain a Nintendo DS and Pokemon Black. "...seriously?" he asked. 

"The clerk at the store said this should keep you entertained for hours."

"Maybe if I was twelve," he said.

"I mean it, Gob. Catch your Pokeymons or read your posters or just stare at the wall, I don't care, but stay out of trouble. No flirting with your secretary. No sexually harrassing employees. In fact, don't talk to anyone,period. I have a room full of board members I have to convince we're not a family of degenerates."

The inspirational posters on the wall were only engaging for about five minutes, so he ended up starting the game anyway, only to be immediately disappointed when it wouldn't let him name his protagonist "Dickhead". With a sigh, he closed the DS and thunked his forehead against the desk softly and repeatedly.

The phone rang.

He stared at it, because he was pretty sure this wasn't a thing that was supposed to happen. Well, at least picking it up would give him something to do for a few minutes. If it was someone he didn't want to talk to he'd just pretend it was a wrong number and hang up. 

"Hello?" he said.

"Hey, Gobie. How's work?"

"Tony?" Gob sat up straight in his chair, heart racing involuntarily. "How'd you get this number?"

"I have my ways," Tony said playfully. "Seriously though, how are things going? You seem like you've been pretty stressed out these past few days."

"Fine," Gob said, sighing and relaxing into the chair. "It's just boring, I guess. I forgot how much it sucks to have a job where you're not allowed to actually do anything fun. At least I get a paycheck, but I don't even know anyone here any more. There was this guy named Gary I used to hang out with sometimes... I wonder what he's up to now."

"Did somebody say 'wonder'?" Tony asked, popping out of the filing cabinet in a puff of purple glitter. He was holding his cellphone, but he hung it up, and it disappeared with a flick of his hand – either into his breast pocket or up his sleeve, Gob thought to himself distractedly. It took him a second to realize he was still holding the phone to his ear for no reason. 

"Not happy to see me, huh?" Tony asked. 

"It's not that." 

"Then what is it?" Tony flopped onto the couch across from Gob's desk, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of exhasperation. "If you don't want to see me any more I wish you'd just tell me. I get that you're a bigshot company president and you're scared of what your mom will think-"

"I am NOT scared of my mother," Gob lied. 

"Really? What's really going on, then?"

Gob wondered how long Tony had been hiding in that cramped space just to get a chance to talk to him. (He also wondered what he'd done with the files that had been in the cabinet, but they probably weren't anything important anyway.) If Tony was this desperate to have a conversation about the future of their relationship, he had to be pretty invested, right? 

Which meant he'd actually succeeded. This was his chance to tell Tony he'd just been using him all along, that he'd never cared about him, that everything between them had been a lie.

But what he said was "I met your kid."

Gob had seen Tony nervous once before. But that had been the excited kind of nervous, with a lot of breathless laughter and half-hearted apologies, and they'd been sharing it. This time was different. Tony went perfectly still, his eyes wide and his lips pressed into a line, and he actually looked – Gob wouldn't have thought it possible – scared.

"At Cinco," Gob continued. "I ran into my ex and she told me. That you lied about being gay."

"Wait," Tony said, "Hold up, you found out I had sex one time five years ago and think that means I can't be gay? What about _you_? You slept with her too."

"That's different!" Gob said. "I just did that because... I don't know. She was there."

" _Same_ ," Tony said defensively. "Also she kept saying she was going to save me from my sinful deviant lifestyle." 

"So why did you..." Gob started to ask, but he wasn't really sure he wanted the answer. Anyway, Tony wouldn't even remember why, so was there really a point in asking?

"Why did I what?" 

"You didn't have any tequila shots," Gob said.

"I know." 

"...you _know_? What do you mean you know?"

Tony sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose and looking exhausted. "I mean I know. I thought you'd take a forget-me-now, so I pretended I had, too. I figured I was wrong partway through dinner Saturday night but I didn't say anything because you were acting so weird about it all."

Gob let that sink in for a minute. "So yesterday when you were trying to get me to go skinny-dipping with you-" 

"I was just trying to seduce you. I mean, again, I guess. And I wanted to see if you'd ever admit what happened. I didn't know you knew about..." He sighed. "I guess we should have talked things out a little more on Cinco, huh? Maybe if your brother hadn't interrupted..."

_"Michael,"_ Gob grumbled.

Tony stood up and shrugged. "You can't have me around any more, that's fine. You've got an image to maintain. You look really hot in that suit, by the way."

"...I should, it cost five thousand dollars," Gob mumbled without conviction. "Come on."

"So I'll just get out of the way," Tony said, heading for the door.

"Wait," Gob said, and Tony turned to look at him over his shoulder, one hand on the doorknob. "You'd really do that? Just pretend nothing happened?"

"If it's what you want, yeah, I guess I would."

"Why?"

Tony's forehead furrowed in thought. "I guess because I like you," he said finally.

Then he left. Just walked out the door, no further words, no dramatics; for a second Gob didn't register that he was gone. Then he bolted up, almost knocking over the desk chair, and ran to catch Tony in the hall.

"Wait," he said, breathless, hand closing on Tony's wrist. The hall was luckily empty. "I do too. Like you. I mean. I think I _like_ like you. And I _am_ scared of my mom but maybe you could be my dirty little secret?"

"I wouldn't mind seeing how that goes," Tony said with a smile, and Gob, with a little laugh of relief, pulled him into a hug, and then wrapped his arms around Tony's shoulders and kissed him the way he'd been longing to for the past three days.

"GOB!" His mother's wailing interrupted what had been one of the most perfect moments of Gob's life. "I SWEAR, GOB, YOU HAD ONE JOB!"

Tony's arms still on his waist, Gob turned to see that someone had opened the blinds on the meeting room windows, and the entire board of directors had turned in their chairs to look at them. Even from across the room Gob could see how white Lucille's knuckles were, gripping the edge of the table.

"Shit," he said.

"Make a run for it?" Tony said with an impish grin, fishing a purple smoke bomb out of his sleeve. They had already made it down three flights of stairs, laughing like maniacs, when the fire alarm went off.


End file.
